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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Multimodal Business Conversations In The "Cloud"

It is becoming
very obvious that sharing and exchanging information, not just conversation, is what business
communication is really all about. That means that people need to have access
to relevant information in real time, while actively involved in a real time
voice or video discussion. Telephony never could do that in the past, but
moving communications to a "cloud” service is enabling that need to be
fulfilled.

Regardless of
who the end users are, whether internal employees, business partners, or even
consumers/customers, but there will always be a need to dynamically reference
and share common information by the parties involved in any kind of real-time
conversation. Now that mobile smartphones and tablets have bridged the gap
between person-to-person communication contacts and access to online apps, the
path to information-enabled voice
conversations between people has been opened.

Today’s
announcement from PanTerra Networks about their Smartbox cloud service
offering confirms the benefits of UC implementation as a “cloud” service, since
they have carried the concept to a logical, higher level of interoperability in
what they describe as “Unified Cloud Services.”
PanTerra’s“SmartBox” service combines
UC applications with information content storage and file sharing services that
lets users manage, search, and contextually initiate UC-enabled contacts from a
single user interface in a single cloud.

Raising The Bar For UCaaS

Everyone is
rushing to putting applications, data, and communications into public, private,
and hybrid cloud environments, because they are really all becoming software
based and serving a variety of multimodal mobile and desktop endpoint devices.
So, just as UC is subsuming telephony communications, we are now seeing the
next step as “cloud” applications subsume both information storage and UC.

With both
information and communications all under one “cloud” roof, it will now be
possible for end users to more fully manage all their business interactions and
more easily correlate all their information exchanges with other people. So, it
won’ be just “person-to-person” contacts that can be tracked, but also managing
contact activities based on information exchanges as well.

While we at UC
Strategies have always seen business communications increasingly involved with
automated business processes (CEBP), the growing role of “cloud" data
storage and file sharing, especially for mobile users, makes it practical to
exploit UC options for exchanging such information. This kind of capability
will be particularly useful when end users are “collaborating” by looking at
common information and discussing it in their choice of communications (text,
voice, video).

How Many “Clouds” Are Involved?

One of the
objectives PanTerra had for developing their SmartBox offering was to minimize
any unnecessary friction between communication applications and file sharing
activities because of inconsistencies from different “cloud” services. By
UC-enabling file sharing in a common “cloud” service, interoperability is
simplified and less costly.

We are just
entering the “cloud” era of online and mobile access to interactions with both
peopleand online information, and the
standards for interoperability across “clouds” remain to be better defined for
maximum efficiency and minimum costs. As service providers begin to offer more
access to applications, information, and communications with people, we should
see more interoperability develop, as was the case with the legacy PSTN for telephony.
In the meantime, PanTerra’s
SmartBox offering is a step forward in bringing real-time
communications and information access closer together.